skonen_blades

Webster’s dictionary defines Webster’s dictionary as:

1. A current living snapshot of a tree with a spidering of moving branches and calcified roots that go back in time to the fadeout onset of recorded mouth sounds.
2. A tree that is not evergreen, coniferous or deciduous but rather temperaneous, pruned regularly during more forgetful times, growing new arms as culture swells.
3. A window on a train through, exposing only the current frame of the journey’s landscape.
4. A core-sample cross-section of today’s expressions.
5. Only one book amongst thousands of languages and millions of dialects.
6. Pretty and limited.
7. Missing more than it holds.
8. A futile claim stake.

Webster’s dictionary defines you as:

1. A pink furry razor with a heart made of affectionate snakes and the soul of an octopus.
2. A concept used as an excuse too often for violence
3. DNA ropes of television static and failures glued together like the studio of a messy artist.
4. Simultaneously the fork of lightning, the branching of blood vessel, the ivy of cracks forming in stressed earth, and the evolution of the path of least resistance.
5. Survival of the strangest.

Webster’s dictionary defines me as:

1. A concept refrigerator.
2. An illusion wearing a suit of decomposing clothes.
3. A gust of life encased permanently in meat.
4. A delusional trick of data processing that, through reflection, accidentally becomes a self.
5. A beautiful aberration capable of both ugliness and the perception of ugliness.
6. A present for death, gathering layers of experience like layers of a gobstopper.
7. Caught memories that time throws.

Webster’s dictionary defines we as:

1. The haunting, uniting knowledge that we are not our memories.
2. Defined by “What are we?”
3. Broken cameras with nowhere to download the recorded input except into each other
4. A consensual mass hallucination (see also: economics)
5. A tidal wave

Webster’s dictionary defines:

1. Salt as dessert.
2. Hope as a cat.
3. All motion as circles.
4. Every horse as a universe.
5. Sasparilla as sorcery.
6. Tautology as Webster’s definition of tautology.

Webster’s dictionary defines defining as:

1. A defiling by filing.
2. A grasp for power, an attempt at dominion, a naming resulting in perceived partial or total ownership.
3. Something that bounces off.
4. A tacit acknowledgement that if the name of thing disappears, the thing still exists.

I still exist.
You still exist.
We still exist.
Regardless of definition.


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Yes, the aliens were invasive. Savagely invasive.

But how could we blame them? We were a treasure trove to them.

The aliens had no name of their own, you see. As a warrior race, they let the planets they invaded name them. As they took planet after planet and civilization after civilization, they collected names. They were up to one hundred and sixty four.
Unpronounceable names screaming forth from terrified beaks, mental picture collages from psychic races, bursts of scent from pheromone speakers, they were all collected in their databank.

If a planet had no sentience, the aliens moved on. Slaughtering animals that could not name them held no interest.
And this is why Earth was like a rainbow of temptation to them.

With over 6900 languages on Earth, the aliens could increase their name count (and thereby their reputation) by factors of ten. And that didn’t even include slang or scientific definitions.

They took their time, making sure to take at least one speaker of each language to record their names for posterity while they laid waste to us.

It was fascinating for us to find out that the way we split and diverged our languages was unique. Most alien civilizations leaned towards a common language but we didn’t. What a strange thing to find out on the eve of our doom.

They didn’t destroy the forests or the oceans. They only targeted the cities and the towns.

As a reward for our staggering bounty of names, they left enough of us to start another stable gene base with the promise that they would be back in another ten thousand years to do it all over again after we’d evolved and split and developed new languages.

There are a hundred thousand of us now. They picked us all up and dropped us in Indonesia where it’s hot most of the time. We’ve started having as many babies as possible and doing our utmost to survive and keep each other safe.

Earth is reclaiming the ruined cities. The stink of human death is dissipating on the wind. In time the animals will multiply faster than we can eat them and the oceans will fill back up with fish.

Although this is the worst chapter of human history, or maybe even the end of it as we have no way to record our findings now other than scratching on bark or painting on cave walls, it sometimes feels as if we are in a new Eden.

I am thirty-two years old. I am on a beach in a hot country. The sun is going down. I can smell the boar our party killed cooking on the dinner fire. Sixty-three women are having babies in the next few months. We are by necessity polygamous to increase diversity for strength. We have no shame at nudity and we must not tolerate jealousy.

We’ve painted pictures of the aliens on any available surface as a warning to future generations. We are struggling to maintain one language among us but we are from all over the world. It’s hard. But we’re trying harder than humanity has ever tried to speak one language to each other so we can all understand. We are one tribe now.

I cannot bring myself to thank the aliens. My own family and all of my friends were killed. I am the only person from my city left alive.

But sometimes in moments like this sunset, I feel something like gratitude in my chest and it makes me feel conflicted inside.
I turn away from the sunset and go to eat.




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When every human speaks there’s a variety of quiet:
The silence of the one who pulls the strings when there’s a riot.
The quiet of the perpetrator perpetrating theft
The stillness of the smile on the face of the bereft
The secret-keeping victims of the sexual abusers
The overcompensating winners thinking that they’re losers
The woman planning suicide who smiles to her friends.
The man who never protests but who bends and bends and bends.
Communities that cover up a crime to make it seem
Like everything is beautiful and everything’s a dream
Everyday hypocrisy and lies and scams and cons
Happening with cavemen from the stone age to the bronze
All the way to present day and centuries to come
The silences we all keep secret make our voices dumb

A cornucopia of quiet shouting us to sleep
Silences as massive as the ocean depths are deep
Secrets and denial mountains choke the very air
But ‘cause we cannot hear it we can say that it’s not there
All the voices crying out that never say a word
Deafen me and deafen you because they’re never heard.

I don’t care how smart you are. Stupid or collegiate.
My favourite human beings simply cannot keep a secret.
Language lets us hide things but it’s us who has the choice.
The truth can set us free but first we have to use our voice.



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I give a standing evasion to the grunting half-gutter; letting skillables dribble out through the teeming sifter of my mouth. A near-vana making my edifice complex clearly visible, a hades of hot nights but your cold shoulders are soft. You’ve won this game of chance with support hose, a rubber neck and pure gumption. If it weren’t for the saddles you’re using for shoulder pads, I’d think you were a golden horseshoe-laying silly goose.

You can appreciate the shattering cymbal of his mind and the bleeding air mail that circles every thought arrowing and minnowing around his head. It is the airspace of genius but it has no radar. Ideas full of passengers go down in flames or crash into each other regularly. If it wasn’t for tuna sandwiches and those arms of yours, he’d become a child made of missing posters.

Some jaws are hinges for waterslides. Some tongues are the kind that wrap kindling up so winter cold that it will never burn. Some lips are only built to tempt, mock, sneer, and pout in a parade of boxer’s promises.

But his set of teeth cuts the sentences into bullets. Those hollow cheeks frame a wind tunnel for aerodynamic language. Throats are bloodied in battle but only the strongly-worded survive. An armour stolen from the same dictionaries that haunted the questing author-minds of Shakespeare, Fat Tony, Rocky Shores, Cheese Louise, and Barney Rubble.

There are baton handoffs that make sense and then there are the bullets that find eight-year-olds in springtime, splattering ice cream that hasn’t even had time to start melting. The yoink of cancer, the screech of car tire interruptus, and the unwanted surprise of the scythe. Your relationship will hunker down beneath the blankets and take the punishment the outside world throws. You’ll laugh right up until it hurts. But know this:

Be kind to the crows and the flies and the worms.

They’ll return the favour.




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It occurs to me that there is language above language. There is language below language and to either side of language as well. These are all terms that I use for lack of a better word.

I am not just talking about tone of voice although that’s part of it. I am not just talking about eye contact although that’s part of it.

These other languages fill in the cracks of the paltry, upended, mish-mash of letters and animal sounds we use to communicate with our mouths.

There is the language of question. That is to one side of language. There is the language of defining. That is to the other side.

The language of the divine is above language. There is a base language below our vocabularies as well.

Again, these terms and directional identifiers are all for lack of a better word. No one is better than another and most languages outside of language involve a combination of one, two, or all four.

It’s there when you achieve an understanding, bone-deep, with someone that you barely know. You can feel the English or whatever language you speak being paltry, stupid, distancing, and primitive compared to the language you’re already speaking.

It’s there when someone you’ve just been introduced to causes feelings of mutual, strong, and instant hostility. The language your mouth forms, the manners and smiles you coat that instinctual feeling with to avoid non-sequitur confrontation, are just as hollow and transparent.

It’s there when one uses language to define something that’s never been defined before. Labored and clumsy sounding on the tongue. The translation of your search into boring, boring language is crushing. It leaves ones feeling stupid and without the proper tools.

It’s there in poetry when one attempts to use language to surpass language. It's the use of words and terms to smack the surface of the invisible oceans like skipping stones to ripple emotions through an audience. It's using the listener or reader's own experiences as resonators for the terms employed.

I am not referring to instinct although that’s part of it. I am not referring to religious experiences although that’s part of it. I am not referring to the fanatical, smiling, glinting eye or science’s doors to the future although that’s part of it.

There are languages underlying, overlaying, and racing our own. They are a sea in which we swim daily.




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It’s dawn.

Cornhufflers plackitly domingo the nerfwhistle crandles.

The woild musk flanders through my astral nose fin. Innitchtime approaches. Horace is forbably merrytackling Renee favant harkfast. What mickle harkfast there is. The floondust tryses slowly up mouthwards in the helden shuffs of sant-light. I’m nomotion-still, eye-fasted to the suncoming.

A tang shart nibs up from the uddle crops. Last worthward, we sonely reaveseted tucks and nips. Not enough. It’s a ferreal cold-wint that’s coming. Toothwork will be rationed. Even the hardweathers have remissed. No blooms means thin times.

A sturrum’s bound to shandy down this eventime. Whuthercast’s bellin’ so. Six and two halling per forebrick is how they’re dicting. Shallen be a morst one, I gemise, going by our nowluck.

Harmly does the riddle focus in, or so they say.

I’ll have to sound it to Renee and Horace apressta harkfast. Haymaps, itsa poss we’ll pass-market this annumnal. We nonev pass-market. That means the welly. We’re dicked until the muckrake. We’ll be deep-enders. It’ll be tilla-time favant we can throwd the creds table resure.

Our thenluck was a gooden. I mark my horgan that our nexluck will be gooden twogain. Now, though. Preska now. Preska here. We’re smackit midlands twixteen billsowing and failcrops.

It’s a billow of a preska. I purst my sniffler and wallen back to homewards. We be trength. We don’t back. We’ll shuff it.

All will be gooden.




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